Jeromy Anglim's Blog: Psychology and Statistics


Friday, March 26, 2010

Causal Inference from Aggregate Data: The Facebook Syphilis Case Study

The Age has an article on the reported connection between using Facebook and Syphilis that is doing the rounds on the Internet. While the idea that Facebook is facilitating social connections seems plausible. And while Facebook may play a role in facilitating risky sexual encounters, the evidence offered (at least that presented in the news reports) for the connection is poor, and provides a good case study in how NOT to reason from data.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Updated Site Map for Jeromy Anglim's Blog Psychology and Statistics

Every Six months or so I like to update the Site Map for my blog jeromyanglim.blogspot.com . Thus, if you're new to the blog, The Site Map provides an overview of previous blog content organised by topic.
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeromyanglim

STATISTICS, R, SPSS, RESEARCH DESIGN

Friday, March 19, 2010

TeXnicCenter Customisations

Over the last few weeks I've been exploring text editors for writing LaTeX documents. I wrote these notes when I was using TeXnicCenter (version 1.0). I have since switched to using WinEdt for writing LaTeX documents. If you do any substantial writing in LaTeX and you are choosing between free TeXnicCenter and shareware WinEdt, buy WinEdt. I'm planning a post soon on WinEdt. Nonetheless, I thought I'd post these rather rough notes I made while playing around with TeXnicCenter in case they are of interest.

Monday, March 15, 2010

APA Style References in LaTeX

This post discusses my experience getting APA style references in LaTeX. This includes both in-text citations and the end of document references list. It focuses on the use of the apacite package.

Converting a Microsoft Word Document into a LaTeX Document

This post discusses my experience converting a large MS Word document into a LaTeX document using Word-to-LaTeX. Along the way I encountered several challenges. I thought I'd document them in case it may be of interest to others.

Export from Endnote to BibTeX, JabRef, and LaTeX

This post sets out a procedure that I used to migrate a large set of Endnote references in a Word Document to a Latex document with BibTeX references in JabRef. In particular, it sets out (1) how to export an Endnote database into BibTeX format ready for inclusion in a LaTeX document; and (2) how to modify an existing document with Endnote citations into a document that cites the BibTeX database.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Using Regular Expressions in R: Case Study in Cleaning a BibTeX Database

I recently had to clean up a BibTeX database containing around 1,000 references. One of the clean up tasks was to ensure that page numbers were separated with en-dashes as opposed to hyphens. This post sets out how I used regular expressions in R to complete the task and check the results. I also hope to highlight the general power of string manipulation in R.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Running Command Line Programs in Windows

Many of the major open source programs that I use (e.g., R, LaTeX, Eclipse) run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. These programs tend to be designed for sophisticated computer users. Among other things, assumptions are often made about knowledge of the command line. What is second nature for a Linux user may be novel to a non-technical Windows user. One of the aims of this blog is to facilitate the use of these open source tools by social science researchers. Thus, this post sets out a few ideas related to running programs at the command line, which I have found useful when working with programs like R, Eclipse, and TexnicCenter.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Choosing an Auto Generation Pattern for BibTeX Keys in JabRef

This post discusses the issue of choosing a default pattern for the BibTex key generator in JabRef.